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EL 102. The Twentieth Century. The Twentieth Century. 20th century: begins with the late 19th century. Weakening of traditional stabilities Different from victorian age
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EL 102 The Twentieth Century
The Twentieth Century • 20th century: begins with the late 19th century. Weakening of traditional stabilities • Different from victorian age 1.The aesthetic movement in 20th century: insistence on ‘art for art’s sake.’: it caused the widening of the gap between the artists and the public. (Alienation of the artist). From France came the tradition of the bohemian life that scorned the limits imposed by conventional ideas of respectability 2. rise of pessimism and stoicism
Important Historical Events in the Period • The Boer War (1899-1902), fought by the British to establish political and economical control over the Boer Republics of South Africa, marked both the high point of and the reaction against British imperialism. It was a war against which many British intellectuals protested and one which the British in the end were slightly ashamed of having won.
Important Historical Events in the Period • The Irish question also caused a great deal of excitement from the beginning of the period until well into the 1920s. • A steadily rising Irish nationalism • In World War I some Irish nationalists sought German help in rebelling against Britain.
Women’s Role in Society Gradually Change • The Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, which allowed married women to own property in their own right • the admission of women to the universities at different times during the later part of the century • the fight for women’s suffrage, which was not won until 1918 (and not fully won until 1928) • these events marked a change in the attitude to women and in the part they played in the national life as well as in the relation between the sexes
Edwardian and Georgian Periods in 20th Century England • Edwardian England (1901-10): • a period of enjoyment and flashiness and it was marked by Edward VII’s extrovert and self-indulgent character. • applies to a period in which the social and economic stabilities of the Victorian age remained unimpaired, though on the level of ideas there was a sense of change and liberation. • Refers to the social and economic stability of the Victorian Age and the flourishing of the middle class • Georgian period: the last phase of assurance and stability before the storm of World War I.
20th century England: Later Historical Developments • 1920s: postwar disillusion • 1930s: depression and unemployment, followed by the rise of Hitler and Fascism • Second World War: Winning a war, Great Britain lost an empire. Independence of India (1947) • Although India and Pakistan elected to remain within the British Commonwealth, other former dominions did not. The Irish Republic withdrew from the Commonwealth in 1949, and the republic of South Africa in 1961.
Art in 20th Century: Modernism • Modernism: “A style or movement in the arts that aims to break with classical and traditional forms” • A new age, with new values, needed a new art.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa, 1503–06 Willem de Kooning, Woman, 1950
Modern art: Neo-primitivism • End of 19th century into 20th • Not a movement per se — a growing interest in African, Oceanic, and Native American art • Imposition of abstract forms on nature
Modern Art: Cubism: Revolt against space • Popular 1907–1920 • Simultaneous perspective (fragmentation into multiple viewpoints)
Poetry • Imagism: The years leading up to World War I saw the start of a poetic movement. Influenced by the philosopher-poet T.E. Hulme’s insistence on hard, clear, precise images and encouraged by the modernist American poet, Ezra Pound, fought against romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in poetry. • Early members: Amy Lowell, Richard Aldington, Hilda Doolittle, J.G. Fletcher, F.S. Flint
Poetry: imagism • Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective • Avoidance of all words that did not contribute to the presentation (“use no superfluous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something”). • Freer metrical movement
Imagist Poem: H.D’s “Oread” Whirl up, sea— Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks, Hurl your green over us— Cover us with your pools of fir.
Imagist Poem: Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” The apparition of these faces in the crowd ; Petals on a wet, black bough.
Poetry:other developments • The revival of interest in metaphysical wit • Higher degree of intellectual complexity than had been found among the Victorians or the Georgians. • Need to bring poetic language and rhythms closer to those of conversation. • Developments in literature are not isolated from other arts. Writers were influenced by the French Impressionist, Postimpressionist, and Cubist painters’ radical re-examination of the nature of reality.
Fiction • The years 1912 to 1930: the Heroic Age of the modern novel (Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster) • Three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in the fiction of this period: • More personal notions of value rather than public opinion • A new view of time: not as a series of chronological moments but a continuous flow in the consciousness of an individual • A new view of the nature of consciousness, which derived in a general way from the pioneer explorations of the subconscious by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, but were also part of the spirit of the age.
More personal notions of value rather than public opinion The novelists’ realization that the general background of belief which united them with their public in a common sense of what was significant in experience had disappeared. The public values of the Victorian novel, in which major crises of plot could be shown through changes in the social or financial or marital status of the chief characters, gave way to more personally conceived notions of value, dependent on the novelists’ own intuitions and sensibilities rather than on public agreement.
A new view of time • In the modern novel, time was not a series of chronological moments, but as a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual. • the view of time as a constant flow rather than a series of seperate moments.
A new view of the nature of consciousness • influenced by the explorations of the subconscious by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. • Consciousness is multiple; the past is always preesnt in it at some level and is continually coloring one’s present reaction. • Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past (1913-28), had explored the ways in which the past impinges on the present and consciousness is determined by memory. The view that we are our memories inevitably led to a technical revolution in the novel. • By exploring into consciousness and memory, a novelist could write a novel concerned ostensibly with only one day in a hero’s life (Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway). • novelists preferred to plunge into the consciousness of their characters in order to tell their stories rather than to provide external frameworks of chronological narrative.
Stream of consciousness • In this narrative technique, the author tries to render directly the very fabric of a character’s consciousness without reporting it in formal, quoted remarks. Developed in 1920s. • No ‘porch’ was constructed at the front of the novel to put the reader in possession of necessary preliminary information: such information emerged, as the novel progressed, from the consciousness of each character as it responded to the present with echoes of the past. • No conventional signposts were put up to tell readers where they were, for that was felt to interfere with the immediacy of impression.
Major themes in modern novel: isolation, estrangement, loneliness • Concentration on the ‘stream of consciousness’ and on the association of ideas within the individual consciousness led inevitably to stress on the essential loneliness of the individual. For all consciousness are unique and isolated, and if this unique, private world is the real world in which we live: How is true communication possible in such a world?
